1960 classic English detective fiction; twenty-first of Marsh's novels
of Inspector Roderick Alleyn. The famous comedic actress Mary Bellamy
has been getting increasingly troublesome, and now feels that all of
her best friends have betrayed her. But only one of them is going to
kill her.

The means of murder is treated as a mystery, though the
components of it are heavily foreshadowed in the text and indeed in
the title. Mostly this story is about the people, and in particular
two of the servants: the dresser, who's Mary's devoted partisan, and
the family nurse, who's thrown in more with Mary's adopted son (who is
a standard Marsh Young Lover, and whom one therefore assumes will turn
out to be innocent, but who is nonetheless a suspect thanks to his
wish to conceal certain information). Both those servants are horrible
people, but in their own distinctive ways, and their interaction
determines much of the course of the investigation.

"I've been talking," Mr. Fox remarked, "to a press photographer and
the servants."

"And I," Alleyn said sourly, "have been eavesdropping on a pair of
lovers. How low can you get? Next stop, with Polonius behind the
arras in a bedroom."

The action takes place almost entirely in one house, over a single
evening, and one assumes that as before Marsh was consciously using a
theatrical arrangement even though there's no evidence that she ever
tried to adapt this or her other "theatre" mysteries as plays.

The person was subjected to masterful but tactful discipline. That
which, unsubjected, declared itself centrally, was forced to make a
less aggressive reappearance above the seventh rib where it was
trapped, confined and imperceptibly distributed.

It's all portrayed as a bit of a lark at times, in spite of the
murder, but everyone has something to hide, and sooner or later they
get round to confessing it. Alleyn doesn't get to display as much
personality as usual, which is a shame, but Fox is back and on fine
form.

Bellamy herself is something of a stereotype, the ageing actress
ferociously jealous of younger women, but some of the other characters
manage similar situations without throwing tantrums; this is not so
much Marsh's supposed misogyny as Marsh's dislike of a certain style
of personality.

There's a startling mention of "non-U" language (oh yes, that happened
in the 1950s, didn't it?), which is really the only thing that makes
this a post-war book; it could easily have been set earlier.

"So you were right, Mr. Alleyn."

"And what satisfaction," Alleyn said wryly, "is to be had out of
that?"